Will China Have Control Over iCloud Data?
For tech companies, China is a tough country. Given its huge population and the number of people with high spending power, it is very lucrative to do business in. At the same time, tough local laws make it difficult for companies to do business there without deviating from their own ideology. Even a company like Apple, which famously fought against agencies like the FBI in the Stateside for user’s data privacy, had to give in to the Chinese way of doing business.
Come February 28th, and the cryptographic keys need to unlock an iCloud account will be stored in China-based data centres for the Chinese users. A new law in China requires cloud services being offered to Chinese users to be operated by Chinese companies. Hence Apple has entered into a contractual arrangement with the state-owned Guizhou — Cloud Big Data Industry Co Ltd, to open a new data centre in China.
Apple has stated that it will not migrate customers’ accounts to the new data centre until they agree to the new terms of service. It also states that 99.9% of users have already agreed. That’s not strange, given that the only alternative option is to turn off your iCloud sync, which would mean a certain loss of personal data in case your iDevice is lost or stolen. However, only those users who have selected China as their country while setting up their iDevice will be affected by the move. Users who selected Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau will remain unaffected.
Human rights activists are speaking up against the move, and rightly so. Until now, the Chinese authorities had to go through the USA’s legal system to gain access to user data. But after this shift, Chinese-issued warrants will be enough to request access to user data. Now, the legal system in China is very different from the majority of other countries. In China, police itself issues and executes warrants, unlike other countries where warrants are generally issued by courts. Given China’s track record and the value it places on its citizens’ personal privacy and preferences, this makes it extremely likely that the system might be manipulated for pursuing both personal and political vendetta. There have been a huge number of cases where people have been arrested for speaking against the government, and some of the government’s critics have reportedly gone missing over the period of last few years.
More specifically, in a case comparable to situations that may come up after this move, Yahoo handed over user data to the Chinese government two decades ago, which led to the arrest and imprisonment of two democracy advocates. Jing Zhao, a human rights activist who is also an Apple shareholder, said he could envisage worse human rights issues arising from Apple handing over iCloud data than the ones which occurred in the Yahoo case.
However, Apple has stressed on the fact that the move doesn’t mean that the Chinese government has any sort of backdoor to the user data. Apple also stated that until now, they have handled over little to no data to the Chinese government. According to transparency reports published by the company, it received 176 requests for user data from the Chinese government over a time period of 4 years, ranging from mid-2013 to mid-2017. Apple, however, shared no user data with the Chinese government. Apple said requests for data from the new Chinese datacenter will be reflected in its transparency reports and that it won’t respond to“bulk” data requests.
Activists are concerned about the aftermath of this move and have started raising their voice for the concerns already. Government committees have been pushing for more influence over decision making within foreign-invested companies in the past couple of years, and activists are concerned that the Chinese Communist Party could also pressure Apple through a committee of members it will have within the company.
With consumers getting increasingly privacy focussed all around the world, the company already seems to be in damage control mode. This issue has raised questions on the company’s image worldwide, so much that the company had to start running ads focussed on privacy, showing how an iPhone is more secure than any other phone out there.
What remains to be seen is how this change in the Chinese government’s policy would result in a change in similar services such as Samsung cloud, as well as other cloud services like Dropbox and Box, which offer cloud space to store all kinds of data. Also, it wouldn’t be surprising if other countries come up with similar laws too. The most important fallout would, however, be the number of Chinese citizens who are booked (read: harassed) or imprisoned by the abuse of this new law.
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
